2010-12-10
post/2168711982
London tuition fee protest - The Big Picture - There are always idiots at protests
Predictably, the Big Picture’s take on yesterday’s student protests has led to a couple of people I follow posting images. However, I think this, from Andy Field (by way of Alex McLean) is a good counterpoint:
As Dan Bye said yesterday on Twitter – the only inevitable thing about a kettle is that it boils. And when it does so the photographers and journalists are there to collect the photographs they require. A kind of protest bingo in which they seemingly have to get as many of the following as possible:
- Young men with their faces covered throwing things
- Someone with their arms thrown wide and their head back in a gesture of power and incitement
- A fire
- A smashed window
- Someone smashing a window
- Someone with blood pouring from an open head wound
- A protester screaming at an anonymous riot officer from less than a foot away
- A line of protesters facing off against a line of riot police
- A statue daubed in paint or hung with signs- (please feel free to continue to fill these out in the comments section)
This parade of cliched protest-porn images is so predictable they might as well have been recycled from the last protest. That is how little influence those who are actually protesting have over how they are represented and repurposed by the powerful.
This rhetoric is no longer the rhetoric of the disposed. It is the rhetoric of the powerful. It tells the story they want to tell.
